We were sorry to observe, in the preface to this work, certain facts stated in order to display the extreme rapidity with which it was written. An epic poem in 12 books finished in six weeks, and, on its improved plan in 10 books, almost entirely recomposed during the time of printing! Is it possible that a person of classical education have so slight an opinion of (perhaps) the most arduous effort of human invention, as to suffer the fervour and confidence of youth to hurry him in such a manner through a design which may fix the reputation of a whole life? Though it may be that a work seldom gains much by remaining long in the bureau, yet is it respectful to the public to present to it a performance of bulk and pretension, bearing on its head all the unavoidable imperfections of haste? Does an author do justice to himself, by putting it out of his power to correct that which he will certainly in a few years consider as wanting much correction? To run a race with the press, in an epic poem, is an idea so extravagant, that Mr. S. must excuse us if it has extorted from us these animadversions. We now proceed to the work itself.
Posted 3797 days ago.
I’ll be reading at Reading Frenzy this Thursday, August 20th, as part of the semi-occasional Print Fancy! series of ’zine release parties. Up alongside me will be—
I am reliably informed there will be slideshows, audience participation, a door-prize, and also refreshments. —I’ll be reading from no. 25, “ – two sweetest passions – ”, though the excerpt in question has little enough to do with either of those. (—Unless, of course, you highly esteem gentrification, and revenge…)
Posted 3802 days ago.
The novel, through its protean variations from Proust to the detective story, is almost always analytic: it would be truer perhaps to say that it nearly always employs analytic processes from time to time. But the saga is never analytic. The novelist is often introspective: the saga never.
Posted 3805 days ago.
Cities attract both those down on their luck and looking for work, and those on a hot streak, looking to celebrate. They attracted the naïve urban planners of the early 20th century who believed a more symmetrical city grid could undo poverty, and at the same time they attracted those who aimed to exploit the poor and disenfranchised through predatory housing schemes. For every art gallery there is an underserved community. For every park, a shelter barely able to serve the people it was built to protect. The truth is that cities offer us a promise that is not always kept. But the promise is vital.
Posted 3809 days ago.
A brief update, as I toil away on no. 26; I’ll be at the Portland Zine Symposium this weekend, with books and badges and chapbooks and a six-year-old who’ll have some prints, if you like.
Fifteenth annual, huh? —Dang, I’ve been going to these for a while.
And also, here’s what it looks like when I’m assembling Patreon packages:
There’s still some work to do to live up to the most recently met goal—getting the site mobile-ready—but there’s also all this writing I need to do? —Anyway. Events as warranted by further bulletins. —Oh! And no. 24’s coming up. How’s July 27th for you? Good?
Posted 3835 days ago.
(We begin with the ritual disclaimer: I am no good at self-promotion. This is how we apologize, for taking up your time: to do something often is to become good, or at least adept at it; that we are no good at it must therefore mean we do not do it often; that we do not do it often means please, understand, we are making what is for us an effort; that we are making, for you, this effort, might just predispose you toward us? Perhaps? —I am no good at self-promotion, QED.)
In just three weeks’ time, the next season of stories will begin, as no. 23, “ – the thin ice – ”, premières. I’ll be celebrating with not one, but two public readings:
Thursday, June 18th, 7 PM at the Spritely Bean;
Wednesday, June 24th, 7 PM at Reading Frenzy.
And while the format will be much the same—a reading, a bit of signing, old books and new zines available, and badges handed out freely—the content will be different: some old, some new, a bit perhaps not entirely finished, but no repeats, guaranteed. Come to both. You know you want to.
Meanwhile, I’m editing no. 25, and writing no. 26. Patrons have had a chance to see the full set of chapter titles for In the Reign of Good Queen Dick; they’ve also gotten to see the covers of nos. 25, 26, and just now, 27. —Which reminds me. I need to figure out what 28 should be.
While I’m about all that, do forgive me this spot of self-promotion, if you might. I’m no good at it, you see. No good at all.
Posted 3878 days ago.
Interviewer
Epic literature has always interested you very much, hasn’t it?
Borges
Always, yes. For example, there are many people who go to the cinema and cry. That has always happened: It has happened to me also. But I have never cried over sob stuff, or the pathetic episodes. But, for example, when I saw the first gangster films of Joseph von Sternberg, I remember that when there was anything epic about them—I mean Chicago gangsters dying bravely—well, I felt that my eyes were full of tears. I have felt epic poetry far more than lyric or elegy. I always felt that. Now that may be, perhaps, because I come from military stock. My grandfather, Colonel Francisco Borges Lafinur, fought in the border warfare with the Indians, and he died in a revolution; my great-grandfather, Colonel Suárez, led a Peruvian cavalry charge in one of the last great battles against the Spaniards; another great-great-uncle of mine led the vanguard of San Martin’s army—that kind of thing. And I had, well, one of my great-great-grandmothers was a sister of Rosas—I’m not especially proud of that relationship because I think of Rosas as being a kind of Perón in his day; but still all those things link me with Argentine history and also with the idea of a man’s having to be brave, no?
Interviewer
But the characters you pick as your epic heroes—the gangster, for example—are not usually thought of as epic, are they? Yet you seem to find the epic there?
Borges
I think there is a kind of, perhaps, of low epic in him—no?
—an interview with Jorge Luis Borges
Posted 3889 days ago.
Well that took longer than was hoped.
The first draft of no. 25, “ – two sweetest passions – ”, clocks in at 18,300 words, and took 83 days to write, if we don’t count the abortive first stab back in (checks calendar) December, yikes. If we don’t count that (and we aren’t), that’s averaging 220 words a day, and again the ouch. I’ll need to bring in no. 26 at about twice that rate of speed if I want to also have no. 27 drafted by the time we kick things off in June.
Still, it’s doable. And there’d be five in the pocket by the time we launch. I could be releasing a chapter a month into October!
—Sorry. I like laying it all out like that. Logistics, you know.
The problem, or part of the problem, was with this one scene, one of those where five or six different emotional vectors crash into an epiphany, but instead of cohering they were clanging, taking entirely too much time and too many words to lay themselves out in sentences that kept having to be unravelled and reknotted, so. What’s there in the draft is at least the shape of something to come, I suppose, but it’s weak and it’s tender and it makes me wince when I poke it. So I don’t; so I let it lie fallow a bit, while I press on to figuring out the broad strokes of what happens next, and then on after that.
(And it’s really all my fault: of course it is, but: the unrelenting drive to tell it slant. —I mean, if you come right out and just say what’s going on, and why, you might as well just write a cover blurb. —But there’s slant, and there’s staggering from lamppost to lamppost, and I’ve ellipticated about all this before.)
At least I know the opening line of no. 26: “There’s two ways this can go.”
—Which is a lie, but hey.
Posted 3925 days ago.
Writing a novel, then, isn’t the expression we should use to sum up the intention preceding a spokesperson’s or post-exotic author’s work. Because it’s more, for him, composing a book that brings together several writing processes—quasi-novelistic, para-novelistic, poetic, sometimes theatrical, specifically post-exotic—with the goal of publicly producing a work that can be read like a novel, which is to say continuously, with a unifying thread, images, characters, and voices that structure and approach a story. Without theorizing here, the goal of every post-exotic author is certainly to give the public a way into, and certainly a stay within the novelistic domains barely or not yet explored by official literature. One concern of these authors is to diminish as much as possible the discomfort their readers might encounter as they enter unknown lands. The spokespeople, our spokespeople, who bring together the often disparate components of our writing community’s multiple voices, try to emphasize in this way the novelistic dynamic. With these fragments, these images in narracts, these Shaggås, these haikus, these rantings, these dream-tales, they create works that resemble novels, they make novels. For them, the idea of the novel is associated with the impressions they have made of those who will receive their stories: prisoners, at first, attentive and infrequent listeners, within these walls; then, second, a large public of bookstore readers, outside these walls. Sympathizing or not, these readers demand something particular of the book they’ve gotten hold of: specifically, I think they’re preparing for a dive. They hope to immerse themselves, beyond their world, within another world, and for that immersion to be enjoyable—or even just possible—and they need friends and travel companions to guide them in their crossings, characters. They’re waiting for a dialogue, both conscious and not, between their memories and those which propel the book, between their memories and our own. They hope that a distinct narrative thread will ensure the narrative’s continuity. Whether this continuity obeys a linear or oscillating or circular sequence doesn’t matter: in just about every post-exotic work, this continuity begins on the first page and goes straight to the last. Above all, post-exotic authors never go into creating things that can’t be experienced. Gratuitous literary experiences have always bored them as readers. Which is why they care that their books’ contents amount to the ingredients of novelistic cohesion, and why they pay attention to images, stories, dramatic arcs, and this forward march to the end. Ultimately, all post-exotic authors are attached to the form commonly known as the novel. Since time immemorial they have harbored affections for this form and, even if they knowingly introduce variants, if they modify its architecture, they genuinely believe that they are enriching it rather than pushing it around, disfiguring it, or betraying it.
Posted 3936 days ago.
The myth is that some transient guy painted these things, but you see him in this picture, and he’s a very proud-looking man. He’s holding a stop sign. It’s like his ghost came back to save the columns.
Posted 3979 days ago.
